Every second, five or six disposable vapes are dropped into American trash cans, each containing a rechargeable battery that will never be recharged. There are roughly half a million heading for the landfill every day, and the number is climbing, up from 4.5 a second only a year earlier. Inside each one is a lithium-ion battery, the same essential technology that powers many things, from phones to electric cars.
In the car, that battery is a marvel of engineering designed to last many years of careful charging. In the vape, it works for a long weekend and then goes in the trash.
The battery in a typical disposable is not spent when the device is. Far from it, in fact. It can be recharged hundreds of times, and in most cases has barely started its working life before being disposed of. Yet a great many of these devices are built with no way to charge them at all, which is a bit like manufacturing a car with the fuel cap welded shut and calling it single-use.
For all intents and purposes, the battery is not disposable. It is merely being disposed of, and those are very different extremes. But what is the cause and effect of this strange, overlooked phenomenon?
The Numbers
Sticking with the numbers for a while longer, we arrive at a startling figure: the lithium inside disposable vapes alone amounts to about 30 tons a year in the United States, which is enough to build batteries for some 3,350 electric vehicles. That metal is finite, mined at considerable human and environmental cost.
When these batteries reach a waste facility, they have a tendency to be crushed, and crushed lithium has a tendency to catch fire. Landfill blazes are estimated to cost around 95 million dollars a year, a bill that lands – as these have a habit of doing – on the taxpayer rather than the manufacturer.
By all accounts, it seems the industry has decided to make things worse. The newest disposables now arrive with color screens, Bluetooth connectivity, and, in some cases, built-in video games. After all, nothing says responsible stewardship of a scarce mineral like a nicotine stick you can play Tetris on before throwing it into a hedge.
Every one of these features means more electronics and more waste. Another small computer designed for the lifespan of a mayfly.
Across the Pond
If you want a sense of how much perfectly good hardware is being squandered, you would do well to consider what one determined person managed to do in the United Kingdom, where a British engineer named Chris Doel collected five hundred discarded disposable vapes, harvested the batteries, and wired them into a bank large enough to power his entire house.
The kettle, microwave, lights, all of it runs off cells that other people had thrown in the gutter after a few days. He is now hooking the thing up to solar panels, for reasons we are unable to determine – presumably out of sheer enthusiasm alone.
Other tinkerers have turned the salvaged parts into musical synthesizers, and the repair outfit iFixit found that the processors inside some disposables are powerful enough to run a small web server. So the situation is this. We are manufacturing hundreds of millions of tiny computers with rechargeable batteries and capable chips, using them for the electronic equivalent of an afternoon, and then throwing them away in such staggering numbers that a single hobbyist can furnish his home from the local roadside.
Logical Fix
None of this is an argument against vaping, which remains a great deal kinder to one’s health than the alternative. It is an argument against the specific madness of the single-use format, and the fix has existed all along. So here it is.
You buy a proper refillable kit one time, and you keep it. You charge it like an adult with a phone, and you top it up from a bottle of e-liquids UK retailers have sold for years. The battery gets to live its full life, and the only thing you throw away is the empty bottle, which is the one part actually designed to be thrown away. So why aren’t more people adopting this perfectly sensible premise? Probably because the disposable vape was sold to us as the convenient option, and in the narrowest sense, it is, in the way that a paper plate is convenient.
The difference is that the paper plates do not contain rechargeable batteries, circuit boards, and enough collective lithium to compete with a government energy strategy.
